Nowhere Girl Read online

  ‘Do you mind if I clear?’ Rita was bored. We went to the empty, tea-smelling lounge.

  ‘Have you ever thought about the worst thing between the young and the old?’ Joshua went on. ‘I don’t mean all the obvious things, like lack of communication, lack of imagination to understand each other’s era. I mean the way they fundamentally drain each other. A daughter looks after her old mother, say, or grandparent. It takes time and energy. The old grandparent feels the uncomfortable disadvantage of having to be looked after. And they are both so confused with duties and responsibilities, that any reserves of spontaneity between them are dried up. Then the motive behind any idea or action between the generations is suspect, for all that the people involved pretend that it isn’t. It’s so exhausting – it makes so many martyrs. In China, there’s a much better system. In the compounds there, it’s the natural duty of the young to look after and entertain the old. The responsibility doesn’t have a ruinous effect, any more than here the responsibility of a mother towards her child is damaging.’

  ‘But you’re being too objective,’ I said. ‘The young don’t look after the old purely out of duty. Love comes into it. A daughter, say, who is fond of her old parents or grandparents, wants to help them. She isn’t wholly a martyr.’

  ‘She may not be to begin with. But in cases where love and responsibility are equally balanced, and responsibility means the daily grind of ministering to someone physically, then love is rarely the element that tips the scales.’

  ‘What would you do in that sort of case?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, as my parents died before the question arose. But I think that I’d have been dutiful to them if I had liked them, and done nothing for them if we’d never got on. I don’t believe in loyalty between relations if they don’t like each other. To me, that’s one of the worst forms of domestic hypocrisy. A great breeding ground for martyrdom. I think the whole pattern of tribal feeling, of families sticking to each other just because they are related, is misconceived. Of course, if they like each other as well as being related, that’s a different matter. But how many of them do? Do you?’

  I thought of my mother, padded in maroon velvet, crocodile shoes and bag to match; her manic Conservatism, her crazy love of pets and sunshine cruises. My father: wispy, blurred, his conscience pulling him from Lords cricket matches back to his fat salaried job in industry; the signed copy of The Just So Stories by his bed. I didn’t love them, I didn’t like them, I didn’t see them.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But Jonathan is a perfect example, though, of someone who is embarrassed by his parents because they aren’t as pseudo intellectual as he is, and at the same time inextricably bound to them by duty. I don’t think he loves them, or has ever thought of loving them. They are just an area in his life that has to be visited. They have to be cared for, like his teeth. – You know how the newspapers always give people good marks for visiting their parents? When they write about a poor undergraduate who has become famous on television, say, they never stop repeating … and he goes to see his parents in Beccles every weekend. … When Jonathan reads one of those sort of reports he’s almost overcome with smug pleasure at the thought of doing the same thing himself. And down we go to Somerset again for another look round Major Lyall’s pig farm, and Jonathan lectures us all about Nabakov. None of us can argue with him, of course, so he has a clear field. But that’s irrelevant.’

  ‘That’s the sort of pointless mesh hundreds of thousands of people have got themselves into and endure,’ Joshua said.

  He went to telegram Mrs Fox.

  She arrived the next afternoon. We fetched her from the station in the taxi with the trough seats. She did not appear surprised to have been asked, but she conveyed her pleasure by delighting in everything. A Sailor’s Day flag in her usual black hat was her only concession to her new environment.

  We had tea in the lounge and she sat opposite us and acted as host, pouring the tea and passing us sandwiches. Any sadness about her sister was concealed. She looked at us with merriment.

  ‘Henry and I nearly went away like you two, once,’ she said, ‘only in the end we didn’t. We just had to imagine it. In those days, our respective families would have been very shocked. But it wasn’t the shock that stopped us. It was the lack of opportunity. Never a chance we had! Edith and my mother guarded over me – they would hardly leave me to a private thought, let alone a weekend by the sea with Henry. As for him, he was always so busy, and all his life he put his duty – his patients – before me. So in the end, of course, when we had given up ever hoping for an opportunity, there was only one thing left to do, and we married.’

  ‘How does that work as a reason?’ asked Joshua.

  ‘It worked very well in our case. Of course, it would be a very old-fashioned reason to get married to-day, wouldn’t it? It seems to me not many modern couples suffer from lack of opportunity!’ She looked round curiously to the other people having tea – middle-aged, outdoor people, in wind-smoothed tweeds. People who seemed too big for the small flowered arm-chairs.

  ‘How do they take it – you?’ she asked. ‘Do they disapprove?’

  ‘I don’t think they know, or if they do, I don’t think they care,’ said Joshua. Then he put his hand on my knee, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. It was one of the few gestures of affection in public he ever made to me.

  ‘Edith, now, she had quite an experience,’ went on Mrs Fox. ‘In 1919 a solicitor asked her to go to York with him for the weekend. She said no, but she didn’t make herself firm enough. – She never was much of a one with words. Anyhow they went, by train, all the way to York. On the way there the solicitor schooled her to tell the hotel receptionist that her name was Edith Freeman, Mrs Edith Freeman, and not Miss Edith Smith. Edith promised. But she was a most honest character, and when the time came she couldn’t go through with it. She signed Edith Smith in the book and the solicitor gave her such a dig in the ribs that she had a bruise for weeks after. He was mad with rage, and she cried and said she wanted to go home. So he put her on the next train back and he never saw her again. After that, Edith said she’d rather stay a virgin. And she did, till the day she died.’ Mrs Fox laughed at her own story.

  ‘I was never very good on the classics,’ she continued, ‘music was more my line, but there is one author I’m well acquainted with, and that’s Jane Austen. Henry loved her. He would read her to me almost every day, every book, time and again. In the end I knew great chunks by heart. And do you know what Jane Austen said about – you?’ She waved towards us with a slight movement of her hand, and straightened herself in her chair like a child about to recite a poem. ‘She said: “While the imaginations of other people will carry them away to form wrong judgements of our conduct, and to decide on it by slight appearances, one’s happiness must in some measure be always at the mercy of chance.” ’

  Three or four of the big tweedy people glanced towards Mrs Fox with some amazement, then returned their eyes to their tea. But Mrs Fox was oblivious to them. ‘I have never forgotten that. Why, if Henry had read me that particular bit before we were married, I really believe I should have insisted on an opportunity: it would have been justified for me. Oh well … perhaps it turned out for the best. But I wouldn’t like it,’ she bent close to us, ‘if your happiness was at the mercy of these people.’

  ‘Really, they don’t bother us, we don’t bother them,’ Joshua told her, quietly.

  After Mrs Fox’s arrival, our lives in Norfolk changed. Joshua was protective towards her, and extended the protection to me. He was more approachable than I had ever known him before. He relaxed. He was mellow, and happy. I felt the same.

  Mrs Fox was a perfect third party. Both of us were aware of an increasing affection for her, which we indulged in but never mentioned. It tied us, in a peculiar way, more deeply than living alone together had succeeded in doing.

  The days were almost uneventful. We walked, we sailed coldly in Joshua’s small boat, we ate lar
ge amounts of filling English food. In the evenings Joshua and Mrs Fox played chess or backgammon while I read a book. Mrs Fox wrote innumerable coloured postcards, very slowly, to her friends and her enemies. Really, she explained, it was sitting at the large desk in the lounge that appealed to her: the free writing-paper, and new blotting paper, the pen chained to the ink stand. Every morning she wrote there for an hour or so, newly delighted.

  One evening she insisted that we took her to the local pub. She drank three pink gins and ate half a pound of Cashew nuts.

  ‘They’re free, aren’t they? Henry always said it was immoral to take advantage of free food in pubs and writing-paper in hotels, but I never could agree with him.’

  ‘When I was travelling round the States on very little money,’ said Joshua, ‘I once lived for a whole week on the free Saltines, ketchup, chutney and water that you get in drug stores. If I hadn’t taken advantage, I’d have almost starved.’ This cheered Mrs Fox. She began on the Onion Flavoured Crisps.

  Joshua and I drank three or four whiskies. Joshua talked to the local squire about his days in the Air Force. We all became warmly drunk, expansive.

  ‘Look here,’ said the squire, towards closing time, ‘let’s not pack in the party now. There’s a fair down the road with only a few nights till it closes for the winter. It may not be Battersea, you know, but why don’t we see what’s cooking down there?’

  Mrs Fox gave a high pitched giggle of pleasure and slipped off her high stool.

  ‘A fair? Squire, there’s nothing in the world I would like more.’ The squire, with somewhat unsteady gallantry, took her arm and led us out to his shooting brake.

  It was a scraggy little fair, a chipped-paint fair with only half its coloured bulbs working. Music from the merry-go-round screeched into the cold air and bulbs of steam rose from newly made toffee apples. In between the stalls, the earth was crusts of semi-hard mud; the grass worn away. Few people were about. A few half-hearted couples stood with hands in pockets, chins in scarves, looking. Not all the quick-worded cajoling and shouted promises of prizes could persuade them to roll a ball or shoot a tin tiger.

  Mrs Fox gave life to the fair. She was what the disheartened stall holders had been waiting for all evening. She pranced from one to another, accurate in her aim, lucky in her guessing, collecting handfuls of small prizes which she stuffed into the squire’s pockets. Finally she persuaded him to escort her to the merry-go-round. There she mounted a billowing wooden horse, he took one beside her, the scratchy gramophone blasted pop music, and they galloped away.

  Joshua and I went on the swings. They were large, shabby boats with curly manes of wood, bow and stern, their paint pale and cracked. They weren’t very high off the ground, but by some trick of light, we balanced midway between the curve of stars in the sky and the lumpy threads of fairground lights. Here, the music was softer. We hummed, and could hear ourselves humming. Joshua, standing looking down at me, worked the swings violently.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, suddenly, and I began to laugh. ‘No, you’re not really. But you look it in this light’. He sat beside me. The swing rocked almost to a standstill by itself, and we laughed and laughed for no particular reason.

  We climbed down. The ground was unsteady. I clung to Joshua.

  ‘What’s happened to us?’

  ‘We’re rather drunk, my beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘But I didn’t feel like this before we went on the swings.’

  ‘Nor did I. It was the rush of air.’ He turned to me, three faces. ‘Think,’ he said slowly, ‘of Jonathan typing in his Roman attic’ The thought shook him with more laughter.

  ‘Sick joke,’ I said, and laughed too.

  Then suddenly we were quite sober. The lights, the stalls, the red-faced men and the stacks of cheap prizes no longer swung crazily about. They just trembled slightly, like pacified leaves after a storm. But still we clung to one another in a dazed way, unspeaking.

  Mrs Fox and the squire came round a corner arm in arm.

  ‘That was the best time I have had in years,’ said Mrs Fox, her hat askew, her voice familiarly high. ‘We rode for twenty five minutes without stopping, and I could have gone on, but the squire couldn’t.’

  ‘I had to rescue you from falling off your horse from dizziness,’ the squire confessed.

  They argued happily. At midnight the squire drove us back to the hotel. He was in no condition to make the sharp turn into the drive.

  The flood lighting had been turned off and we made our way up the gravel drive by the murky light of a half moon. Now it was all over, Mrs Fox seemed a little deflated.

  ‘When’s your birthday ?’ she asked Joshua. ‘Two weeks to-day,’ he told her, after a pause to work it out. ‘Why?’

  ‘Then I can give you a party,’ she said. ‘That will be nice, something to look forward to. It’s lucky it’s so soon. A lucky chance. I always like to have something to look forward to.’ She straightened her back and quickened her pace.

  *

  We were wakeful. We talked and half-slept for a few hours. At four, Joshua got out of bed.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. ‘Coming?’

  Automatically, I asked if I should wake Mrs Fox. She had been everywhere with us since her arrival.

  ‘No, stupid. You’re an idiot, sometimes.’ He was irritable, unapproachable again, his mood of a few hours ago quite dead.

  ‘Where I’m stupid, I suppose,’ I said, ‘is ever expecting you to be consistent. You change more quickly than anybody I’ve ever met. You never remember what you say, or how you’ve felt. Or if you do, it never makes any difference to you a few hours later.’ I was pulling on thick stockings, boots, a duffle coat, by the frail grey light in the window. ‘You can’t bear the idea of surrendering yourself completely. You get halfway there, and you enjoy it, I know you do. And then you retract.’

  ‘Quite right. But I’m not going to change.’

  ‘It makes you difficult to be with, sometimes.’

  He did up my scarf, frowning.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said.

  We took the narrow wet lane to the marshes. It was very cold. Clumps of mist moved about us. On the horizon, above the thin line of sea, flaming streaks curled back into the sky like edges of burning paper, leaving an opalescent sheen beneath.

  Joshua walked very fast so that I had to jog to keep up with him. I complained of a stitch.

  ‘Grumpy,’ he said, turning round but not slowing down, ‘on such a morning.’

  Perversely, he stopped a few yards later and waited for me to catch up with him. He indicated the sky, the view, with a gesture of mock pleasure, as if to kill any intent I may have had to take the beauty seriously. Then his hand swooped to rest on my shoulder.

  ‘They stood there, looking at each other,’ he began, in a voice that trembled with mock seriousness, ‘there was nothing to say. It was bigger than both of them.’

  ‘Stop sending me up.’ I laughed. He smiled.

  ‘You look so hopeful, sometimes,’ he said. ‘It’s enough to put fear into any man’s heart.’

  ‘Hopeful? Me? What of?’

  In answer he cupped my face in his cold hands, observed it seriously, then spoke once more in his spoof voice.

  ‘Mrs Lyall – you know something about yourself? At this time of day, you have the most extraordinarily funny face.’

  The mists were rising. He took my arm, and with exaggerated slowness we began to walk back for breakfast.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Clare! Can I come round?’ David Roberts, at eight-thirty in the morning. He’d never rung Joshua’s flat before.

  ‘Not really. We’re hardly up. What’s the matter?’ Long pause.

  ‘I’m back from Rome.’ Joshua was working a small circle of the carpet into fluff with his big toe. ‘I got back last night.’

  ‘Was it nice?’ I played for time till he was ready to break his news.

  ‘Perfect weather. I saw Jonathan severa
l times. We did a bit of drinking together.’ There was something melancholy about his voice.

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Your coffee’s getting cold,’ Joshua interrupted.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said to David. I put my hand over the speaker.

  ‘Get rid of him,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Fine,’ said David. ‘Very nicely set up indeed.’ He paused again. Then: ‘Well, it’s a pity I can’t come round. Perhaps later on.’

  ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘Nothing much, really. It’s just that I was wrong about Rosie Maclaine.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, Jonathan was right about her, really. He said she was more sexy than trustworthy.’

  ‘What’s she done?’

  ‘Stayed in Italy.’

  ‘In Rome?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say where. I don’t think so.’

  Joshua got up off the floor and slammed out of the door. Irritable.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to David.

  ‘What was that noise? Don’t say you’re rowing already?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, that’s all I had to tell you. I’ll call you some time.’

  I put down the telephone and looked round the untidy room. There was ash on the carpet, coffee stains on the cushions, books and magazines overlapping everywhere. Alison, who came twice a week, said we didn’t give her a chance. We didn’t care. Joshua was used to it, didn’t notice it. I liked it after the prim tidiness of the mews house.

  It was cold, in my dressing-gown. Dank November air. I shut the window and Joshua came back into the room. Dressed, now.

  ‘What does that boring man mean by ringing up at this hour?’

  ‘It’s not that early. Rosie Maclaine has apparently left him.’

  ‘What girl in her right mind wouldn’t leave him? You needn’t have prolonged the conversation.’

  ‘You’re hung over,’ I said. We’d drunk two bottles of good wine the night before.

  ‘Not at all. I just wanted to get at my own telephone.’ He slumped dramatically on to the sofa and dialled a number.